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UCL Urban Laboratory

UCL Urban Laboratory

exploring new methods of urban research across disciplinary boundaries

UCL Urban Laboratory

critical, independent, rigorous and original scholarship on cities

UCL Urban Laboratory

leading urban debate and the design and planning
of contemporary cities

UCL Urban Laboratory

engaging with London and its communities

UCL Urban Laboratory

developing international networks and
comparisons in urban research and action

UCL Urban Laboratory

drawing on UCL’s heritage of pioneering
urbanism

UCL Urban Laboratory

critical and creative urban thinking, teaching, research, practice

Cities Methodologies 2013

Publication date:
Apr 03, 2013 03:22 PM

Start:
Apr 23, 2013 06:30 PM
End:
Apr 26, 2013 08:00 PM

Location:
UCL Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0NS

The UCL Urban Laboratory community is
delighted to present the 2013 edition of Cities Methodologies, an annual
exhibition and events programme showcasing recent innovations in urban research
methods and cross-disciplinary work on cities worldwide.

From the start, five years ago, Cities
Methodologies has been a pan-UCL cross-faculty initiative and we are pleased to
once again be able to hold the exhibition in UCL’s Slade Research Centre.
Previous shows have also travelled further afield, most recently to Bucharest
in 2010.

The exhibition and events feature work
by undergraduates, masters and PhD students as well as academic staff and the
wider community of researchers and practitioners developing new methods to tackle
urban questions. We welcome you to participate in the exciting programme of
talks, screenings, workshops and launches that accompanies this year’s diverse
array of individual and group exhibits. In each gallery space visitors will be
exposed to different methods of scrutinising the city and processes of
urbanization, including practice-led research from art and architecture,
ethnography, film-making, graphic design, soundscapes, photography, archival
studies and performance.

All events are open to the public and
free to attend. No booking is required.

April 24, Wednesday

Masters and doctoral students from the UCL Bartlett
School of Architecture MA Architectural History module Theorising Practices/Practicing
Theory: Art, Architecture and Urbanism have produced an exhibition of
site-writings that open out into a performative display of
site-readings. Join the students and visiting critics throughout the day for
presentations and discussion of the exhibition.

11am - 12.30pm: Artists in Residence, the drawing shed: Screens in the Wild

'Screens in the Wild' explores the spatial, social and cultural dimensions of Urban Prototyping by connecting urban screens in four locations (London and Nottingham), exploring how this medium can enable participation in the urban environment. Artists in residence the drawing shed (Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd) will present their work using situated screen and online social media Twitter and Instagram to raise awareness of challenges in urban space such as 'homelessness'.

Katharine Willis, Lecturer in Architecture at Plymouth University,
will investigate the impact of social networks on public spaces. Her work focuses on the emergence of hybrid
neighbourhoods, new types of spaces which will be explored and reviewed through
some current empirical work.

2pm - 3 pm: Anchor and Magnet

Anchor and Magnet are hosting an open discussion around the outcomes of their recent residency in Brixton which explored issues around migration, place and identity through participatory art and dialogue. They will be also be sharing outcomes of The Brixton Exchange, a one-day debate which took place in February 2013 focusing on questions of how regeneration/redevelopment affects urban areas with a migrant history/migrant communities. For more info see:http://anchorandmagnet.wordpress.com/the-brixton-exchange/

What is the logic
of the planning process in contemporary Moscow? How
is it informed by traditional sociological methods? In this talk and
Q&A session, we will use an experimental study conducted in one
of Moscow's courtyards to discuss the challenges of a participatory
design process in post-socialist cities and the methods which inform
it.

Hilary Powell - Book of Hours - chapter 1

A
behind the scenes look at the materials, methods and stories Hilary is working
with to construct a book of hours based on the changing fringes of the London
Olympic Park. The project explores the
process of working in direct collaboration with the materials
of these sites (from roofing zinc to London brick stock) to experiment with and
reinvigorate the traditions of etching and pop up book construction.

Max Colson – Hide and
Seek: the Dubious Nature of Plant Life in High
Security Spaces by Adam Walker-Smith

A
review of the latest photographic research project by the artist's alter-ego
(the paranoid photojournalist Adam Walker-Smith), illuminating
some of the extraordinary methods that he used to identify and document plants
he suspected as being part of the high security apparatus found in London's
secure financial and commercial spaces.

Looking at an inner
courtyard that now wants to become a public piazza, we will try to understand a
Social Movement and the wider process of the Struggle for Housing in Rome
deconstructing its space and everyday life. In so doing, the talk will discuss
the conditions of possibility for an archaeological approach to the study
of the built environment.

5pm – 6.30pm Interchanges #2

Gallery presentations by exhibitors followed by Q&A sessions

William Hunter – Four Men and a Methodology in Beirut

This "critical poetic reading" of Beirut traces a week-long
research immersion into the conflicting politics, visions and approaches to
urban development in a still on-going post-war reconstruction context.

Andrew Stevenson - 16 Cities: Participatory
potentials for sensory ethnographies in exploring place-making in newcomers to
a city

A showcase of
collaboratively produced artworks from Andrew’s sensory ethnographic fieldwork
exploring place making amongst new arrivals in a city.

Isis Nunez Ferrera – Tracing Scarcity in the Built Environment:
From Material Accounts to Socio-Spatial Realities

This talk will explain a series of diagrams that illustrate the construction of spatial scarcity in informal settlements and how these diagrams can be used as analytical and projective tools to reveal spaces for change and creative intervention.

7 pm: Gynna Millan and Juraj Rutsek - Whose Olympics?

An exploratory project carried out during
London 2012 to record transformations in open spaces and citizens'
experiences as a result of the Olympic Games. During this talk, the team
will present how video was used as a
methodology for urban research as well as sharing some original footage that is part of the forthcoming documentary Whose Olympics?

April
25, Thursday

3.30pm: Architrope - House

Film screening
followed by Q&A: House is a 20-minute video projection that explores aspects
of what the house means to us today, using the example of a derelict Georgian
town house in Marylebone.

The exhibited
pieces are palimpsests that represent the Heygate as an absence by
over-layering its different times. Here, absence embodies multiple and
simultaneous presences situated at a distance, creating an alternative vision
for the vanishing Heygate Estate while interrogating the processes of urban
renovation.

Starting from a
design for Grand Paris, this is an
experimental artistic and academic project which combines creative inputs and
formats with transdisciplinary theoretical and critical thinking, organising
them in a conceptual model of the urban galaxy in order to design a future
strategy for the extended urban area.

Michael Hebbert – Klimaatlas: revealing the invisible
city

Michael examines
the methodology of the urban climate map, connecting meteorological observation
and modelling with real-world urbanism and the complex microclimate of urban
streets, illustrating a method that is
up-and-running in several cities world-wide, but unaccountably missing
from mainstream literature on urban climate change.

6 pm – 8 pm: Participatory Methodologies PhD workshop

A
cross-disciplinary conversation about participation focusing on a selection of
projects in progress by doctoral students from the Bartlett Faculty of the Built
Environment (Architecture, the Development Planning Unit, Planning) and
affiliated with the UCL Urban Laboratory, including members of the recently
formed Participatory Activist and Research Network (PARN).

April 26, Friday

10 am – 6pm: isik.knutsdotter – astate

astate is
a continuous public meeting presented here as a series of
conversation-events, films and workshops.

11.30am -1pm: Dennis, Galviz, Merrill – Under London by Rail: Memory, the Archive and
Heritage: A Round-Table

A round-table
discussion on themes of heritage, memory and the archive, focused around the
three presenters’ (Richard Dennis, Carlos Galviz and Sam Merrill) research on
and participation in the ongoing commemoration of the 150th anniversary
of the London Underground, with contributions from guest discussants including
Sam Mullins (Director, London Transport Museum) and David Lawrence (Senior
Lecturer in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, Kingston
University).

3pm-4.30pm Interchanges #4

Gallery presentations by exhibitors followed by Q&A sessions

Bernadette Devilat – The role of the record:
photography of earthquake-affected areas
through time

The exhibition
explores the changes – and the non-changes – that a heritage village in Chile, San
Lorenzo de Tarapacá, has experienced since a large earthquake affected it in
2005. Photographic records from different
historical periods are juxtaposed, aiming to reveal sometimes
imperceptible variations and to question the reconstruction process that
follows the earthquake.

This
project deals with movement and identity in the city, questioning our
interaction with various spaces through an overlap of language and painting, sculpture and architecture. The exhibit is offered
up for interaction and engagement – to
be walked through, picked up, worn and imagined.

Little Red Dots – First Person Audio/Visual Urban
Narratives

A
short presentation explaining some of the ideas underpinning the First Person Audio/Visual Urban
Narrative approach, as well
as the related research material presented in the exhibition. Followed by a
brief tour of UCL’s immediate environs designed to explore the collaborative
possibilities of the methodology.

5pm-6.30pm Interchanges #5

Gallery presentations by exhibitors followed by Q&A sessions

David Roberts and Andrea Luka Zimmerman of Fugitive
Images – From ‘Heroin’ to Heroines: Performing social housing in an inner-city
estate

A dialogue
between filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman and writer David Roberts of Fugitive
Images to discuss their long-term collaborative engagement filming residents of
the Haggerston Estate.

Ioana Marinescu + Tapio Snellman – Dalston Fluxus

Discussion of the making of 'dalston fluxus' (5') - a continuous
elevational portrait of Dalston High Street, originally commissioned for the
London Cultural Olympiad 2012.

Henrietta Williams – The Secret Security Guard

Exploring the
theatre of security: Henrietta Williams
explains 'The Secret Security Guard', a photographic project based on fortress
urbanism, private security and regeneration which resulted from her experience
working as a security guard and x-ray screener during the London Olympics.

The
launch of Urban Pamphleteer issue #1, ‘Future & Smart Cities’. Each
illustrated pamphlet in this series collates and presents expert voices, across
disciplines, professions, and community groups, around one pressing
contemporary urban challenge. The intention is to confront key
contemporary urban questions from diverse perspectives, in a direct and
accessible tone, drawing on the history of radical pamphleteering.